May 2013

Friday, May 31, 2013

Merlin (pictured in the beautiful drawing by Alan Lee above) is a figure intimately connected with forests in Arthurian lore. After the disastrous Battle of Arderydd, Merlin goes mad and spends years as a
wild man in the woods, living a solitary, animal existance, before he emerges
into his full power as a magician and seer. His prophesies are contained
in Welsh poems said to be written by Myrddin himself (from texts dated to the 9th century and onward);
many of them can be found in the Llyfr Du Caerfryddin and The Black Book of
Carmarthen. In the "Afallennau" and "Oineau" poems
(from The Black Book, translated by Meirion Pennar), Myrddin portrays
his life among apple trees in the forest of Celydonn: "Ten years and
two score have I been moving along through twenty bouts of madness with
wild ones in the wild; after not so dusty things and entertaining minstrels,
only lack does now keep me company. . . ." He despairs
that he, who once lay in women's arms, now lies alone on the cold, hard
ground, with only a wild piglet for company (a creature much revered by
the Celts).

This flight into wilderness is a common theme in shamanic initiation
from cultures around the globe. Through deprivation, an elemental
existence,
and even madness, the shaman embarks on an inward journey; when he or she returns to world it is as a changed and not-quite-human being, aligned with the powers of
nature, able
to converse with animals and to see into the hearts of men.
Suibhne (or Sweeny) in Irish lore, for example, is a warrior cursed in
battle and forced to flee to the
woods in the shape of a bird. Like Merlin, Suibhne goes stark raving
mad during his long
exile — but when he emerges from the trial, he has mastery over
creatures of the forest. (For a gorgeous modern rendition of this tale, I recommend the book Sweeny's Flight,
an edition containing Seamus Heaney's long poem based on the myth, along
with photographs of the Irish countryside by Rachel Giese.)

In epic romances, knights and other heroes go into the woods
to test their strength, courage, and faith; yet some of them also madness there, like the lovelorn Orlando in Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, one of the most popular poems of the Italian Renaissance. In Gawaine and the Green Knight, an Arthurian romance from the 14th century, a mysterious figures rides
out of the woods and into Camelot on New Year's eve. His clothes are green,
his horse is green, his face is green, even his jewels are green. He
carries a holly bush in one hand and an axe of green steel in the other.
The Green Knight issues a challenge that any knight in the court may strike
off his head — but in one year's time, his opponent must come to the forest
and submit to the same trial. Gawaine agrees to this terrible challenge
in order to save the honor of his king. He slices off the stranger's
head — but the knight merely picks it up and rides back to the forest,
bearing the head in the crook of his arm. One year later, Gawaine seeks
out the Green Knight in the Green Chapel in the woods. He survives the trial,
but is humbled by the green man and his beautiful wife through an act of
dishonesty.

In the French romance Valentine and Orson, the Empress of Constantinople is accused of adultery,
thrown out of her palace, and gives birth to twins in the wildwood. One
son (along with the mother) is rescued by a nobleman and raised at court,
while the other son, Orson, is stolen by a she-bear and raised in the wild.
The twins eventually meet, fight, then become bosom companions — all before
a magical oracle informs them of their kinship. The wild twin becomes civilized,
while retaining a primitive kind of strength — but when, at length, his
brother dies, he retires back into the forest. Rather than a shamanic figure or a legendary hero, Orson is an example of the Wodehouse (or wild man) archtype: a primitive yet powerful
creature of the wilderness. Other examples can be found in tales ranging from Gilgamesh (in the figure
of Enkidu) to Tarzan of the Apes.

"The medieval imagination
was fascinated by the wild man," notes Robert Pogue Harrison (in his book Forests: The Shadow of Civilization), "but
the latter were by no means merely imaginary in status during the Middle
Ages. Such men (and women as well) would every now and then be discovered
in the forest — usually insane people who had taken to the woods. If hunters
happened upon a wild man, they would frequently try to capture him alive
and bring him back for people to marvel and wonder at."

Other famous
wild men of literature can be found in Chretien de Troyes's romance Yvain,
Jacob Wasserman's Casper Hauer (based on the real life incident of
a wild child found in the market square of Nuremberg in 1829), and in the
heart–stealing figure of Mowgli in Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book...but we'll talk more about "wild children" in another post.

Mythic tales of forest outlaws feature a very different kind of wild
man, for in such stories (the Robin Hood cycle, for example) the hero
is generally a civilized man compelled, through an act of injustice, to
seek the wild life -- without ever quite losing the trappings of civility in the process. These tales tend to take place in the merry Greenwood and not the fearsome Dark Forest: a place of shelter and refuge rather than a perilous world inhospitable to mortals.

"This British take on the forest evolved long before Shakespeare," writes poet and scholar Ruth Padel, "centered on the Rymes of Robyn Hood: eighty or so fourteenth-century
ballads, full of James Bond fights, male camaraderie, adventures and
escapes, but also of passionate longing for a people's hero. They date
from the time of the Peasant's Revolt, 1381. Sometimes Robin is a
disaffected Saxon lord who flees to the woods to become a mediaeval
Batman, dressing his men in green, robbing the rich to give to the poor.

"Behind them is the star role of the forest in the politics of
disaffection which, kick-started by Norman rule, runs through English
history from the thirteenth century on. Outlaws, outside the law, took
to the forest, which was outside civilization. Yet the law itself was
unjust. 'They were not outlaws because they were murderers,' says T.H.
White of Robin's men in The Sword in the Stone. 'They were
Saxons who had revolted against the Norman conquest. The wild woods of
England were alive
with them.' Forest law claimed most forest for the king. The
king's deer were protected by Norman barons and their officers, Sheriff
of Nottingham clones. It was death for a commoner to kill the deer —
yet they did, all the time. They plundered the forest for meat and
firewood; they cut down trees for grazing. Most Robin Hood films begin
with a peasant killing deer and Robin protecting him against a Norman
lord. Helping the poor, outlawed Robin stands for the hope of better law
against corrupt nobles, sheriffs, priests, injustice."

Magical tales of hermits and woodland mystics form another category of the wild man/woman archetype. Christian legendry, for example, is filled with tales of saints living
in the wilderness on a diet of honey and acorns. This, again, is bolstered
by the actual experience of people in earlier times, when it was not uncommon
for folk marginalized by the community (mystics, witches,
widows, herbalists, root doctors, eccentrics, and simpletons) to live in the wilds beyond the village,
by choice or necessity. An elderly neighbor of mine here in Devon remembered such
a figure from her youth, a harmless old soul who lived in a cave and was said to have prophetic powers.

The wild woman archetype has come down through the centuries primarily in a scorned and diminished form: the wicked witch of the fairy tale forest.These women are invariably portrayed as ugly old crones (at least in the versions of the tales that we know best today): godless or pagan creatures aligned with nature, not civilization; evil, or at least amoral; knowledgeable, and therefore dangerous. Their spells and potions are remnants of pagan ways and beliefs, natural magic, hedgerow medicine, herbalism, and rural midwifery...all of the things that came to be seen as wild, wanton, associated with women, peasants, and other "backwards" folk of the countryside.

(We should remember, however, that there's also a long folkloric and historic tradition of "cunning
men" living in the wild, versed in natural magic and folk medicine.
Among the root workers and hoodoo doctors of the American South, for
example, or practioners of the Cunning Arts of the British Isles, one
finds both women and men weaving magic and medicine from herbs, charms,
roots, stones, wax and flame; from words, songs, music, and the
whispering of the bees.)

Baba Yaga, from Russian fairy tales, is one of the few fairy tale witches distinguished with a name, and the complexity of her character can be seen in the many stories told about her:

"Baba Yaga brings many of the dominant
themes of Russian fairy tales together," writes fairy tale scholar Helen Pilinovsky. "She travels on the wind,
occupies the domain of the leshii, the forest spirits, is associated with death, and is an acceptable surrogate for the generic ved'ma, or witch. Also known as 'Baba Yaga Kostinaya Noga,'
or 'Baba Yaga Bony Leg,' she possesses gnashing steel teeth and
penetrating eyes, and, in short, is quite enough to intimidate even the
most courageous (or foolhardy, depending on the tale) hero or heroine.
Like the witches of other cultures, her preferred method of
transportation is an implement commonly used for household labor, though
unlike the witches of the West, rather than traveling upon a broom, she
chooses to ride in a mortar, rowing with a pestle, and uses a broom to
sweep away the tracks that she leaves. Her home is a mobile hut
perched upon chicken legs, which folklorist Vladimir Propp hypothesized
might be related to the zoomorphic izbushkii, or initiation huts, where neophytes were symbolically 'consumed' by the monster, only to emerge later as adults.

"In his book An Introduction to the Russian Folktale,
Jack Haney points out that Baba Yaga's hut 'has much in common with the
village bathhouse … the place where many ritual ceremonies occurred,
including the initiatory rituals.' This corresponds to the role that her
domicile plays in the fairy tales of Russia: though the nature of the
initiation differs from story to story, dependent upon the circumstances
of the protagonist, Baba Yaga's presence invariably serves as a
signifier of change. Baba Yaga's domain is the forest, widely
acknowledged as a traditional symbol of change and a place of peril,
where she acts as either a challenger or a helper to those innocents who
venture into her realm. In Western tales, these two roles are
typically polarized, split into different characters stereotyped as
either 'witch' or 'fairy godmother.'
Baba Yaga, however, is a complex individual: depending on the
circumstances of the specific story, she may choose to use her powers
for good or ill."

In her excellent book From the Beast to the Blonde,Marina Warner suggests a kinship between forest-dwelling crones and the beasts of the woods. "In the witch-hunt fantasies of early modern Europe they [wolf and crone] are the kinds of being associated with marginal knowledge, who possess pagan secrets and in turn are possessed by them." In Little Red Riding Hood, for example: "Both [wolf and crone] dwell in the woods, both need food urgently (one because she's
sick, the other because he hasn't eaten in three days), and the little
girl cannot quite tell them apart."

In older versions of the story, called The Grandmother's Tale, the wolf-in-Granny-disguise tricks the girl into dining on meat and wine. She doesn't know that it is her grandmother's flesh and blood she's ingesting. French folklorist Yvonne Verdier liken this grisley meal to a sacrificial act, a physical
incorporation of the grandmother by her granddaughter. It's a scene
reminiscent of a wide variety of myths in which a warrior, shaman,
sorcerer, or witch attains another's knowledge or power through the
ritual ingestion of the other's heart, brain, liver, or spleen -- but
Verdier views it in more symbolic terms: "What
the tale tells us is the necessity of the
female biological transformation by which the young eliminate the old in
their own lifetime. Mothers will be replaced by their daughters and the
circle will be closed with the arrival of their children's children."

Several poets have explored the connection between the young female heroes of fairy tales and the witches who dwell at the heart of the woods, speculating on how the first might one day turn into the second. In "Becoming the Villainess," Jeanine Hall Gailey writes of one such young woman: "It seems unlikely now that she will ever return home, remember what it was like, her mother and father, the promises. She will adopt a new costume, set up shop in a witch's castle, perhaps lure young princes and princesses to herself, to cure what ails her — her loneliness, her grandeur, the way her heart has become a stone."

"The daughter is too bold to be anything but a cuckoo in the nest," says Holly Black in "Bone Mother." "Good girls sit home and sew in the dark. They don't go seeking fire in the witch's woods....There, she learns to part seed from stone, sweet from spoilt, fate from fortune."

In "Baba Yaga Duet" by mother-and-daughter authors Midori Snyder and Taiko Haessler, the younger initiate boasts to the witch: "I will teach you, now that you have burned your old recipes, the new ones I remedied. And I will uncover the hidden plants I've stashed in my hair, the worlds I have in my mouth, the tattoos woven in my skin and the sky I discovered in my breast."

"Here is the part I like, where I become the one to grant those wishes as I please," says the narrator of Wendy Froud's poem "Faery Tale" (in the anthology Troll's Eye View), who has done her time in the hero role and is now relishing her cronehood. "Snakes and lizards, toads, diamonds, pearls and gold, a poisoned apple, gingerbread, a pumpkin coach, a gilded dress. Tools of my trade, my teaching aid. My gifts, my curses. Prince to frog, frog to prince, iron shoes and feet that dance and dance and dance, and I like it both ways, like to bless them and eat them."

There is, of course, a more positive way to look at the Wild Woman of the woods, which psychologist and cantadora storyteller Clarissa Pinkola Estés has explored extensively in works such as Women Who Run With the Wolves:

"Fairy tales, myths, and stories provide understandings which sharpen our sight so we can pick out and pick up the path left by the wildish nature. The instruction found in stories reassures us that the path has not run out, but still leads women deeper, and more deeply still, into their own knowing. The tracks which we are following are those of the Wild Woman archetype, the innate instinctual self....

"To adjoin the instinctual nature does not mean to come undone, change everything from right to left, from black to white, to move from east to west, to act crazy or out of control. It does not mean to lose one's primary socializations, or to become less human. It means quite the opposite. The wildish nature has vast integrity to it. It means to establish territory, to find one's pack, to be in one's body with certainty and pride regardless of the body's gifts and limitations, to speak and act in one's behalf, to be aware, alert, to draw on the powers of intuition and sensing, to come into one's cycles, to find out what one belongs to, to rise with dignity, to retain as much consciousness as we can."

"It's not by accident that the pristine wilderness of our planet disappears as the understanding of our own inner wild nature fades," Estés adds. "It is not so difficult to comprehend why old forests and old women are viewed as not very important resources. It is not such a mystery. It is not so coincidental that wolves and coyotes, bears and wildish women have similar reputations. They all share related instinctual archetypes, and as such, both are erroneously reputed to be ingracious, wholly and innately dangerous, and ravenous."

I'll end today with another quote on the Wild Woman from Estés, which I believe applies to all you Wild Men out there too:

"We are all filled with longing for the wild. There are few culturally sanctioned antidotes for this yearning. We were taught to feel shame for such a desire. We grew our hair long and used it to hide our feelings. But the shadow of the Wild Woman still lurks behind us during our days and in our nights. No matter where we are, the shadow that trots behind us is definitely four-footed."

The wonderful wildwood art above is: "Merlin in the Forest" by Alan Lee and a painting by Alan (I'm afraid I don't know this one's name); a 14th century manuscript illustration for Gawaine and the Green Knight; "A Virtuous Lady Tames a Woodwose," which is a 15th century tapestry from the Church of Iceland; two Robin Hood illustrations by Howard Pyle; "Hansel & Gretel's Witch" by Rima Staines; Baba Yaga" by Forest Rogers; "Little Red Riding Hood and the Wolf" by Trina Schart Hyman; "Vasilisa" by Ivan Bilibin; a Wild Woman drawing by Brian Froud, "Nature's Bride" by Amy Ross; and "Little Red" by Jackie Morris.

Wednesday, May 29, 2013

Jungian scholar Marie-Louise von Franz saw the fairy tale forest not only as a place of trials for the hero, but also an archetypal setting for retreat, reflection, and healing. In a lecture presented to the C.G. Jung Institute in Switzerland in the winter of 1958-59 (subsequently published as The Feminine in Fairytales), she looked at the role of the forest in the story of "The Handless Maiden" (also known as "The Armless Maiden," "The Girl Without Hands," and "Silver Hands"). In this tale, a miller's daughter loses her hands as the result of a foolish bargain her father has made with the devil. (In darker variants, it is because she will not give in to incestuous demands.) She then leaves home, makes her way through the forest, and ends up foraging for pears (a fruit symbolic of female strength) in the garden of a tender-hearted king — who falls in love, marries her, and gives her two new hands made of silver. The young woman gives birth to a son — but this is not the usual happy ending to the story. The king is away at war and the devil interferes once again (or, in some versions, a malicious mother-in-law), tricking the court into casting both mother and child back into the forest. "She is driven into nature," von Franz points out. "She has to go into deep introversion.... The forest [is] the place of unconventional inner life, in the deepest sense of the word."

The Handless Maiden then encounters an angel who leads her to a hut deep in the woods. Her human hands are magically restored during this time of forest retreat. When her husband returns from the war, learns that she's gone, and comes to fetch his wife and child home, she insists that he court her all over again, as the new woman she is now. Her husband complies -- and then, only then, does the tale conclude happily. The Handless Maiden's transformation is now complete: from wounded child to whole, healed woman; from miller's daughter to queen.

Von Franz compares the Handless Maiden's time of solitude in the woods to that of religious mystics seeking communion with god through nature. "In the Middle Ages, there were many hermits," she notes, "and in Switzerland there were the so-called Wood Brothers and Sisters. People who did not want to live a monastic life but who wanted to live alone in the forest had both a closeness to nature and also a great experience of spiritual inner life. Such Wood Brothers and Sisters could be personalities on a high level who had a spiritual fate and had to renounce active life for a time and isolate themselves to find their own inner relationship to God. It is not very different from what the shaman does in the Polar tribes, or what the medicine men do all over the world, in order to seek immediate personal religious experience in isolation."

In other versions of the Handless Maiden narrative, the young queen's time in the woods is not solitary. The angel (or "white spirit") leads her to an inn at the very heart of the forest, where she's taken in by gentle "folk of the woods." (It's not always made clear whether they are human or magical beings.) The queen stays with them for a full seven years (a traditional period of time for magical/shamanic initiation in ancient Greece and other cultures world-wide), during which time her hands slowly re-grow.

In an article titled "Healing the Wounded Wild," Kim Antieau uses this variant of the story to reflect on illness, the healing process, and the ways our relationship with the natural world impacts both physical and psychic health. "In many cultures," she writes, "the prescription for chronic illness was a stay in the country (not necessarily the wild country). In ancient Greece, the chronically ill went to Asklepian Temples for relief. The priests created tenemos — sacred space — for the patient to help facilitate healing. The ill went to the temples and prepared with purification and ritual for a healing dream. Then the patient went to the abaton — the sleeping chamber — and dreamed. Often the dreams either healed the patients or told them of a remedy which would heal them.

"Today, practitioners of integrated medicine believe the body wants to heal, and the patient needs the time, encouragement, support and space to be able to get well. In many instances the time, encouragement, and support can be found, but wild spaces are lacking. Silvia [the Handless Maiden] was able to travel deep into a wild place. Where do we go? Where do the wild things go (including human beings) when no wild remains?"

When such stories are devised for young men, she notes, the hero typically sets off from home seeking adventure or fortune in the unknown world, where the fantastic waits to challenge him. "Along the journey, his worth as a man and as a hero is tested. But when the trials are done, he returns home again in triumph, bringing to his society new–found knowledge, maturity and often a magical bride....

"While no less heroic, how different are the journeys of young women. In folktales, the rite of passage from adolescence to adulthood is confirmed by marriage and the assumption of adult roles. In traditional exogamous societies, young women were required to leave forever the familiar home of their birth and become brides in foreign and sometimes faraway households. In the folktales, a young girl ventures or is turned out into the ambiguous world of the fantastic, knowing that she will never return home. Instead at the end of a perilous and solitary journey, she arrives at a new village or kingdom. There, disguised as a dirty–faced servant, a scullery maid, or a goose girl, she completes her initiation as an adult and, like her male counterpart, brings to her new community the gifts of knowledge, maturity, and fertility."

Although fairy tales have been known as children's stories from roughly the 19th century onward, older versions of these same narratives (aimed at older audiences) looked unflinchingly at the darkest parts of life: at poverty, hunger, abuse of power, domestic violence, incest, rape, the sale of young daughters to the highest bidder under the guise of arranged marriages, the effects of remarriage on family dynamics, the loss of inheritance or identity, the survival of treachery or calamity. In rites of passage tales devised for young women, the heroes don't tend to ride merrily off into the forest in search of fame and fortune, they are usually driven there by desperation; the forest, despite its perils, is a place of refuge from worse dangers left behind.

The Handless/Armless Maiden is not a passive princess in the old Disney mold, waiting for romance to rescue her. She finds her own way to the orchard of a king in her search of food, and although she agrees to marry him, a royal wedding is not the conclusion of her story, it's the half-way point. "It is a narrative with a strange hiccup in the middle," Midori points out. "The brutality of the opening scene seems resolved as the Armless Maiden is rescued in a garden and then married to a compassionate young man. But she has not completed her journey of transformation from adolescence to adulthood. She is not whole, not the girl she was nor the woman she was meant to be. The narratives make it clear that without her arms, she is unable to fulfill her role as an adult. She can do nothing for herself, not even care for her own child.

"Conflict is reintroduced into the narrative to send the girl back on her journey of initiation in the woods. There the fantastic heals her, and she returns reborn as a woman. Every narrative version concludes with what is in effect a second marriage. The woman, now whole, her arms restored by an act of magic, has become herself the magic bride, aligned with the creative power of nature. She does not return immediately to her husband but waits with her child in the forest or a neighboring homestead for him to find her. When he comes to propose marriage this second time, it is a marriage of equals, based on respect and not pity.

"I have come to believe," Midori continues, "that robust narratives such as the Armless Maiden speak to women not only when they are young and setting out on that first rite of passage, but throughout their lives. In Women Who Run With the Wolves, psychologist Clarissa Pinkola Estés presents a fascinating analysis of this tale, demonstrating the guiding role the armless maiden plays in a woman's psychic life:

" 'The Handless Maiden is about a woman's initiation into the underground forest through the rite of endurance. The word endurance sounds as though it means "to continue without cessation," and while this is an occasional part of the tasks underlying the tale, the word endurance also means "to harden, to make robust, to strengthen," and this is the principal thrust of the tale, and the generative feature of a woman's long psychic life. We don't just go on to go on. Endurance means we are making something.'

"To follow the example of the armless maiden," Midori concludes, "is an invitation to sever old identities and crippling habits by journeying again and again into the forest. There we may once more encounter emergent selves waiting for us. In the narrative, the Armless Maiden sits on the bank of a rejuvenating lake and learns to caress and care for her child, the physical manifestation of her creative power. Each time we follow the Armless Maiden she brings us face to face with our own creative selves."

British poet Vicki Feaver has also reflected on the story in relationship to creativity. In an interview in Poetry Magazine, Feaver discusses her poem "The Handless Maiden," inspired by the fairy tale :

"The story is that the girl’s hands are cut off by her father and she is given silver hands by the king who falls in love with her. Eventually, she goes off into the forest with her child and her own hands grow back. In the Grimms' version it is because she’s good for seven years. But there’s a Russian version which I like better where she drops her child into a spring as she bends down to drink. She plunges her handless arms into the water to save the child and it’s at that moment that her hands grow. I read a psychoanalytic interpretation by Marie Louise von France in her book, The Feminine in Fairytales in which she argues that the story reflects the way women cut off their own hands to live through powerful and creative men. They need to go into the forest, into nature, to live by themselves, as a way of regaining their own power. The child in the story represents the woman’s creativity that only the woman herself can save. This was such a powerful idea that I had to write about it. It took me three years to find a way of doing it. In the end I chose the voice of the Handless Maiden herself -- as if I was writing the poem with the hands that grew at the moment that she rescued her work, her child.

"I suppose I go through the process of endlessly cutting off my hands and having to grow them again. You ask if I’ve found any strategies for writing. Only to go away on my own, to be myself, and just to write." *

"Fairy tales are journey stories," says Ellen Steiber (in a beautiful essay on the fairy tale "Brother and Sister"). "They deal with initiation and transformation, with going into the forest where one's deepest fears and most powerful dreams are realized. Many of them offer a map for getting through to the other side."

In the universe of fairy tales, the Just often find a way to prevail, the Wicked generally receive their comeuppance — but there's more to such tales than a formula of abuse and retribution. The trials these wounded young heroes encounter illustrate the process of transformation: from youth to adulthood, from victim to hero, from a maimed state to wholeness, from passivity to action. Fairy tales are, as Ellen says, maps through the woods, trails of stones to mark the path, marks carved into trees to let us know that other women and men have been this way before.

Though they warn us to steer clear of gingerbread houses and huts that stalk the woods on chicken's feet, they also show the way to true shelter, sanctuary, and places of healing deep in the forest. (The real lesson here, it seems to me, is to learn to tell the difference.) Think of the hut in "Brother and Sister," for example, where the siblings set up housekeeping in the woods, far from the everyday world (and their stepmother's malice), adapting to the rhythms of the forest, of self-sufficiency, and of the brother's enchantment. Or the woodland cabin in "The White Deer," where the deer-princess sleeps safely each night. Or the cottage (or cave) where Snow White finds shelter with a band of rough forest-dwelling men (the metal-working dwarves of Teutonic folklore in some versions, outlaws and brigands in others). Even the Beast's lonely castle deep in the woods is more sanctuary than prison...a place where captor and prisoner both transform, in true fairy tale fashion.

These places are linked not only by their woodland settings, but by the temporary nature of the sanctuary provided. The curse is broken or the secret revealed, or the magical task finshed, or the trial survived; transformation is complete, and the hero must now return to the human world. Traditionally, rites-of-passage ceremonies are designed to propel initiates into a sacred place and sacred state (the realm of the spirits, gods, or ancestors; the place of vision, instruction, and metamorphosis)...but then to bring them back again, back to the tribe or community and to ordinary life. We're meant to come out of sweatlodge, down from the Vision Quest hill, home from the Moon Hut, back from the sacred hunt, bringing with us new knowledge, new dreams, a new status, a new name or role to play....intended not just for the sake of personal growth but in service to the whole tribe or community. Likewise, we're not meant to remain in the circle of enchantment deep in the fairy tale forest -- we're meant to come back out again, bringing our hard-won knowledge and fortune with us...in service to the family (old or new), the realm, the community; to children and the future.

Unless, that is, we stay in the woods and take on a different role in the story...not a hero this time, but one of the forest dwellers who aids (or hinders) another's journey: the woodwose, the hermit, the sage, the mad prophet...the men and woman who run with the wolves...the femme sauvage with her herbs and charms... the conjure man with his beehives and songs....

But those are stories for another day, and another journey into the woods.

The gorgeous paintings above are by one of my all-time favorite artists, Jeanie Tomanek, who lives and works in Georgia, near Atlanta.

"My all-time favorite folktale is 'The Handless Maiden,'" says Jeanie. "It is about a woman’s journey toward wisdom and self-realization and the obstacles and helpers she encounters. This tale encompasses many of the archetypical representations of women. My 'Everywomen' portray the mothers, daughters, lovers, and crones. Strong, wise women who will survive. These are filtered through my own experiences many times."

The paintings here are: The Handless Maiden, Forget Me Not, Communion, Fairy Tales, The Diary, Silver Hands, Silver Hands and the Numbered Pears, The Diary, Envoy, and Sometimes in the Forest. (All imagery copyright by the artist.) Please visit Jeanie Tomanek'swebsiteto see more of her work, and Everywoman Art on Etsy to purchase originals and prints. You'll find a recent interview with the artist here.

* I am grateful to Midori Snyder for allowing me to quote such a long passage from her Armless Maiden essay, and I urge anyone interested in the tale to please read this splendid essay in full. My knowledge of the Vicki Fever interview in Poetry Magazine comes entirely from Midori's essay, and I want to credit that properly here.

Tuesday, May 28, 2013

Since yesterday was a holiday, our "Monday Tunes" are on Tuesday this week, and we're still roaming among the trees, led on this time by women's voices....

Above: "Stags Bellow," a wonderful woodland (and ocean) song by Martha Tilston, who lives not far from here on the Cornish coast. It's an autumnal piece, but it fits our theme, if not the season, and is too lovely to wait until autumn to share. It comes from Tilston's 9th album, Machines of Love and Grace (2012).

I wish I could also play her Little Riding Hood song, "Red," this morning -- but there are no good videos for it, alas. (There's a poor quality one here, but it doesn't do the song justice.) "Red" is on Tilston's 2004 album Bimbling, and if you're a fairy tale fan, it's well worth seeking out the recorded version.

Next, two songs by the American folk singer and songwriter Alela Diane, who is based in Portland, Oregon.

Above: "Pieces of String," a lovely song from her debut album, The Pirate's Gospel, back in 2006.

Below: "The Alder Trees, " a gently magical arboreal song from her second album To Be Still, 2009.

Next:

"The Willow Tree," a sad but very beautiful song performed by the Celtic harp trio Triskela (Diane Stork, Portia Diwa, and Shawna Spiteri), from the Bay Area of California.

And for the last song, let's add some men's voices too:

Here's "Oak, Ash, and Thorn," sung by the English folk singer & folk scholar Fay Hield, backed up by The Hurricane Party: Rob Harbron, Sam Sweeney, Andy Cutting, and Hield's partner Jon Boden. This impromptu performance was filmed in the bar at Cecil Sharpe House (home of The English Folk Dance and Song Society) after Hield's gig there last autumn. The words are from a Rudyard Kipling poem, put to music by the great Peter Bellamy.

Saturday, May 25, 2013

We're supposed to be out of the office during this holiday weekend, but I've snuck back in while my People aren't looking so I can write up my Saturday post. My paws are a little clumsy, but if I sit up like a Person, I can just about manage the computer by myself. My post today is my first piece of canine poetry:

Ode to the Neighbor's Cats

Thou still unravish'd demons of fur, Thou taunting creatures of tooth and tail,As brazen beasts as e'er there were Whilst over garden wall do sail: What evil does thou plot today To taunt a brave and noble dog Who's honor bound to chase away All cats who set foot in this yard? What beasts are these, half Siamese? What mad pursuit? What fleet escape? What howls and barks? What wild ecstasies...

But wait, but wait...what's this?

Oh no! I hear my People coming!

Quick! Turn the computer off!

"Me? What am I doing? Uh...nothing."

"Just sitting here chewing my bone...."

P.S. There are more of my poems hidden in the picture captions. Just run your cursor over them. Love, Tilly

Friday, May 24, 2013

I'm away today, as it's the start of a long holiday weekend here in the UK. I'll be back at my desk, and back to the "Into the Woods" series of posts, on Tuesday, May 28. Have a good weekend, everyone.

“I want so to live that I work with my hands and my feeling and my brain. I want a garden, a small house, grass, animals, books, pictures, music. And out of this, the expression of this, I want to be writing. (Though I may write about cabmen. That’s no matter.) But warm, eager, living life — to be rooted in life — to learn, to desire, to feel, to think, to act. This is what I want. And nothing less.” ― Katherine Mansfield

Thursday, May 23, 2013

"In the mid–path of my life, I woke to find myself in a dark wood," writes Dante in The Divine Comedy,
beginning a quest that will lead to transformation and redemption. A
journey through the dark of the woods is a motif common to fairy tales:
young heroes set off through the perilous forest in order to reach
their destiny, or they find themselves abandoned there, cast off and
left for dead. The path is hard to find and treacherous, prowled by wolves,
ghosts, and wizards...but helpers, too, appear along the way: good
fairies, wise elders, and animal guides, usually cloaked in unlikely disguises. The hero's task is to tell
friend from foe, and to keep walking steadily onward.

The Dark Forest is not the merry greenwood of Robin Hood legends, or a Disney glade where dwarves whistle as they work, or a National Park with walkways and signposts and designated camping sites; it's the forest primeval, true wilderness, symbolic of the deep, dark levels of the psyche; it's the woods where giants will eat you and pick your bones clean, where muttering trees offer no safe shelter, where the faeries and troll folk are not benign. It's the woods you may never come back from.

"The woods enclose," writes Angela Carter (in The Bloody Chamber). "You step between the fir trees and then you are no
longer in the open air; the wood swallows you up. There is no way
through the wood anymore; this wood has reverted to its original
privacy. Once you are inside it, you must stay there until it lets you
out again for there is no clue to guide you through in perfect safety;
grass grew over the tracks years ago and now the rabbits and foxes make
their own runs in the subtle labyrinth and nobody comes.... "

"I stood in the wood," Patricia McKillip tells us (in Winter Rose). "Now it was a grim and shadowy tangle of thick dark
trees, dead vines, leafless branches that extended twig like fingers to
point to the heartbeat of hooves. The buttermilk mare, eerily, eerily
pale in that silent wood, galloped through the trees; tree boles turned
toward it like faces. A woman in her wedding gown rode with a man in
black; he held the reins with one hand and his smiling bride with the other. She wore lace from throat to heel; the roses in her chestnut hair
glowed too bright a scarlet, mocking her bridal white…When they
stopped, her expression began to change from a pleased, astonished
smile, to confusion and growing terror. What twilight wood is this? she
asked. What dead, forgotten place?"

The goblins of the glen, in Christina Rossetti 's great poem "Goblin Market," are thoroughly dangerous creatures. When young Laura buys but will not eat
their fruit...

"Lashing their tails
They trod and hustled her,
Elbow’d and jostled her,
Claw’d with their nails,
Barking, mewing, hissing, mocking,
Tore her gown and soil’d her stocking,
Twitch’d her hair out by the roots,
Stamp’d upon her tender feet,
Against her mouth to make her eat."

To know the woods and to love the woods is to embrace it all, the light and the dark -- the sun dappled glens and the rank, damp hollows; beech trees and bluebells and also the deadly fungi and poison oak. The dark of the woods represents the moon side of life: traumas and trials, failures and secrets, illness and other calamities. The things that change us, temper us, shape us; that if we're not careful defeat or destroy us...but if we pass through that dark place bravely, stubbornly, wisely, turn us all into heroes.

"The sense of secrets, silence, surprises, good and bad, is fundamental to forests and informs their literatures," notes Sara Maitland (in Gossip from the Forest). "In fairy stories this is sometimes simple and direct: Hansel and Gretel get lost in the woods, and then suddenly they come upon the gingerbread house. Snow White runs in terror through the forest and suddenly stumbles upon the dwarves' cottage; characters spending scary nights in or under trees suddenly see a twinkling light -- and they make their laborious way towards it without having any idea what they will find when they arrive.....

"The forest is about concealment and appearances are not to be trusted. Things are not necessarily what they seem and can be dangerously deceptive. Snow White's murderous stepmother is truly the 'fairest of them all,' The wolf can disguise himself as a sweet old granny. The forest hides things; it does not open them out but closes them off. Trees hide the sunshine; and life goes on under the trees, in thickets and tanglewood. Forests are full of secrets and silences. It is not strange that the fairy stories that come out of the forest are stories about hidden identities, both good and bad."

Appearance deceive in the dark of the woods. You must beware of the helpful wolf by the path, of the beautiful woman who asks for a kiss, of the cozy little house with its door standing open, a meal on the table, and its owner nowhere in sight. No
matter how tired you are, warns Lisel Mueller (in her poem "Voice from the Forest"), do not enter that house, do not eat the bread, do not drink the wine: "It is only when you finish eating and, drowsy and grateful, pull off your shoes, that the ax falls or the giant returns or the monster springs or the witch locks the door from the outside and throws away the key."

But if you must enter, Neil Gaiman advises (in his poem "Instructions"), be courteous. And wary. "A red metal imp hangs from the green–painted front door, as a knocker, do not touch it; it will bite your fingers. Walk through the house. Take nothing. Eat nothing."

Those last words are important. Folk tales from all over the world warn
that eating the food of a witch, a demon, a djinn, a troll, an ogre, or
the faeries can be a dangerous proposition. You might owe your youngest
child in return, or be bound to your host for the rest of your life.
Likewise, don't kiss the beautiful woman who offers you a meal and a bed
in her sumptuous chateau hidden deep in the woods. By morning light
she'll be a monster, and her house but a pile of rocks and bones.

And yet, despite all the fairy tale warnings, sometimes we're compelled to run to the dark of the woods, away from all that is safe and familiar -- driven by desperation, perhaps, or the lure of danger, or the need for change. Young heroes stray from the safe, well-trodden path through foolishness or despair...but perhaps also by canny premeditation, knowing that venturing into the great unknown is how lives are tranformed. When Gretel walks into the woods, writes Andrea Hollander Budy
(in her poem "Gretel," from The House Without a Dreamer),
"she means to lose everything she is. She empties her dark pockets,
dropping enough crumbs to feed all the men who have touched her or
wished." In Ellen Steiber's "Silver and Gold," Red Riding Hood is asked to explain how she failed to distinguish her grandmother from a wolf. "It's complicated," she answers. "Sometimes it's hard to tell the difference between the ones who love you and the ones who will eat you alive." But what she doesn't say is that if the wolf comes again, she will surely follow. Why? Carol Ann Duffy answers in her poem "Little Red-Cap" (from The World's Wife): "Here's why. Poetry. The wolf, I knew, would lead me deep into the
woods, away from home, to a dark tangled thorny place lit by the light
of owls." To the place of poetry and adventure. The place where the hard and perilous work of transformation begins.

Sara Maitland compares the transformational magic in fairy tales to the everyday magic that turns caterpillars into butterflies. "[S]omething very dreadful and frightening happens inside the chrysalis," she points out. "We use the word 'cocoon' now to mean a place of safety and escape, but in fact the caterpillar, having constructed its own grave, does not develop smoothly, growing wings onto its first body, but disintegrates entirely, breaking down into organic slime which then regenerates in a completely new form. It goes as a child into the dark place and is lost; it emerges as the princess, or proven hero. The forest is full of such magic, in reality and in the stories."

My husband uses the term the Dark Forest to refer that part of the art-making process when we've suddenly lost our way...when the creation of a story or a painting or (in his case) a play reaches a crisis point...when the path disappears, the idea loses steam, the plot line tangles, that palette muddies, and there is no way, it seems, to move forward. This often occurs, interestingly enough, right before true magic happens: first the crisis, then a breakthrough, an unexpected solution, and the piece comes to life. In a journal Howard wrote while creating a fairy tale play with students in Portugal he notes:

"Today I arrived in the middle of the Dark Forest, and the path has
almost disappeared. It is scary now, and all the certainties have gone. The cast
members are weary, and their ability to come up with interesting work
has diminished. Even our opening meditation today felt tired. The Dark Forest. I knew I was heading into it, and, as always, the
forest has its own way of manifesting in each creative project. Perhaps the students are getting stuck and are unable to develop their
parts. Perhaps it's that our storytelling has become flat, or that I'm
forgetting important, simple things, like the development of the boy's
character throughout the play.
Or maybe it's all of these things....

"It's
difficult to keep my original vision of the piece as I travel through the
forest. I have to trust the vision I had at the start of the work, and
that the ideas that have been set in motion will somehow come to
fruition. I know that I can't lose faith now, even though at this point
in the creative process one often starts to question the show, the cast,
and one's own ability.

"I can't turn around. I have to keep going, through this tough
period, and find energy from somewhere! I'm reminded of the first day of
the pilgrimage I took seven years ago, across the mountains of France
and Spain to Santiago de Compostela. I cycled up route Napoleon late in
the day, as the sun was setting, knowing that no matter how exhausted I
was I had to push on to Roncesvalles.
I could not turn back as I was too far along the path — but if I did
not get to the monastery before sundown, I would surely lose my way and
die of exposure in the Pyrenees. This is the feeling I have now: I'm
exhausted, I don't know when the turning point will come, but I have to
plough on."

So what should we do when we're in the Dark Forest, creatively or personally? Perservere. As Howard says, plough on. The gifts of the journey are worth the hardship, as writer & writing teacher Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew notes: (I've quote this passage before, but it's well worth repeating in this context.)

"When you enter the woods of a fairy tale," says Andrew, "and it is night, the trees
tower on either side of the path. They loom large because everything in
the world of fairy tales is blown out of proportion. If the owl shouts,
the otherwise deathly silence magnifies its call. The tasks you are
given to do (by the witch, by the stepmother, by the wise old woman) are
insurmountable -- pull a single hair from the crescent moon bear's
throat; separate a bowl's worth of poppy seeds from a pile of dirt. The
forest seems endless. But when you do reach the daylight, triumphantly
carrying the particular hair or having outwitted the wolf; when the owl
is once again a shy bird and the trees only a lush canopy filtering the
sun, the world is forever changed for your having seen it otherwise.
From now on, when you come upon darkness, you'll know it has dimension.
You'll know how closely poppy seeds and dirt resemble each other. The
forest will be just another story that has absorbed you, taken you
through its paces, and cast you out again to your home with its rattling
windows...."

And as Rainer Maria Rilke suggests (in his beautiful little book Letters to a Young Poet), "Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are
princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty
and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest
essence, something helpless that wants our love." Including the bears and the beasties, the fungi and faeries, the wolves and witches hidden in the deep forest...and the frightening, spell-binding, life-changing stories to be found only in the dark of the woods.

Art above: "Fur, Feather, Tooth and Nail" by Arthur Rackham, "The Faery Ring" by Alan Lee, two illustrations for Christina Rossetti's "Goblin Market" by Arthur Rackham, "Chase of the White Mouse" by John Anster Fitzgerald, "Goblins" by Brian Froud, "The Gingerbread House" by Trina Schart Hyman, "The Queen's Pearl Necklace" by John Bauer, "Hansel and Gretel" by Arthur Rackham, "The Lamb and the Serpent" by Arthur Rackham, "Little Red Riding Hood" by Richard Hermann Eschke, "The Briarwood" (from the Briar Rose series) by Sir Edward Burne-Jones, "Troll in the Wood" by John Bauer, and "She Kissed the Bear on the Nose" by John Bauer.

Wednesday, May 22, 2013

"Time and time again I am astounded by the regularity and repetition of
form in this valley and elsewhere in wild nature: basic patterns,
sculpted by time and the land, appearing everywhere I look. The twisted
branches in the forest that look so much like the forked antlers of the
deer and elk. The way the glacier-polished hillside boulders look like
the muscular, rounded bodies of the animals -- deer, bear -- that pass among
these boulders like loving ghosts. The way the swirling deer hair is
the exact shape and size of the larch and pine needles the deer hair
lies upon one it is torn loose and comes to rest on the forest floor. As
if everything up here is leaning in the same direction, shaped by the
same hands, or the same mind; not always agreeing or in harmony, but
attentive always to the same rules of logic and in the playing-out,
again and again, of the infinite variations of specificity arising from
that one shaping system of logic an incredible sense of community
develops . . .

. . . felt at night when you stand beneath the stars and see
the shapes and designs of bears and hunters in the sky; felt deep in the
cathedral of an old forest, when you stare up at the tops of the
swaying giants; felt when you take off your boots and socks and wade
across the river, sensing each polished, mossy stone with your bare
feet. Felt when you stand at the edge of the marsh and listen to the
choral uproar of the frogs, and surrender to their shouting, and allow
yourself, too, like those pine needles and that deer hair, like those
branches and those antlers, to be remade, refashioned into the shape and
the pattern and the rhythm of the land. Surrounded, and then embraced,
by a logic so much more powerful and overarching than anything that a
man or woman could create or even imagine that all you can do is marvel
and laugh at it, and feel compelled to give, in one form or another,
thanks and celebration for it, without even really knowing why."

“Ethics that focus on human interactions, morals that focus on
humanity's relationship to a Creator, fall short of these things we've
learned. They fail to encompass the big take-home message, so far, of a
century and a half of biology and ecology: life is -- more than anything
else -- a process; it creates, and depends on, relationships among
energy, land, water, air, time and various living things. It's not just
about human-to-human interaction; it's not just about spiritual
interaction. It's about all interaction. We're bound with the rest of
life in a network, a network including not just all living things but
the energy and nonliving matter that flows through the living, making
and keeping all of us alive as we make it alive."

― Carl Safina (The View from Lazy Point: A Natural Year in an Unnatural World)

“If you know wilderness in the way that you know love, you would be unwilling to let it go. We are talking about the body of the beloved, not real estate.” - Terry Tempest Williams

Tuesday, May 21, 2013

The Green Man is a pre–Christian symbol
found carved into the wood and stone of pagan temples and graves, of medieval
churches and cathedrals, and used as a Victorian architectural motif, across
an area stretching from Ireland in the west to Russia in the east. Although
commonly perceived as an ancient Celtic symbol, in fact its origins and
original meaning are shrouded in mystery. The name dates back only to 1939,
when folklorist Lady Raglan drew a connection between the foliate faces
in English churches and the Green Man (or "Jack of the Green")
tales of folklore. The evocative name has been widely adopted, but the legitimacy
of the connection still remains controversial, with little real evidence
to settle the question one way or the other. Earliest known examples of
the foliate head (as it was known prior to Lady Raglan) date back to classical
Rome — yet it was not until this pagan symbol was adopted by the Christian
church that the form fully developed and proliferated across Europe. Most folklorists conjecture that the foliate head symbolized mythic
rebirth and regeneration, and thus became linked to Christian iconography
of resurrection. (The Tree of Life, a virtually universal symbol of life,
death and regeneration, was adapted to Christian symbolism in a similar
manner.)

The Jack in the Green is a figure associated
with the new growth of spring, fertility, and May Day celebrations. In a number of English towns (such as Hastings in East Sussex) the Jack pageant is still re-enacted each year. The Jack in the Green is played by a man in a towering eight–foot–tall costume of
leaves, topped by a masked face and a crown made out of flowers. He travels
through the streets accompanied by men (and now women) dressed and painted all in green, others dressed and painted entirely
black, and children bearing flowers. Morris and clog dancers entertain the crowds while the Jack, a
trickster figure (and traditionally lecherous) chases pretty girls and plays the fool. When he reaches a certain place, the Morris
dancers wield their wooden swords and strike the leaf man dead. A poem is solemnly
recited over his body, and then general merriment breaks out as the crowd plucks Jack's leaves off for luck.

("The killing of a tree spirit," notes James Frazer in The Golden Bough, "is always associated
with a revival or resurrection of him in a more youthful and vigorous form.")

Tree men aren't unique to the British Isles; they can be found in folk pageants all over Europe. In Bavaria, for example, a tree–spirit called the pfingstl roams through rural
towns clad in alder and hazel leaves, with a high pointed cap covered by
flowers. Two boys with swords accompany him as he knocks on the doors of
random houses, asking for presents but often getting thoroughly drenched
by water instead. This pageant also ends when the boys draw their wooden
swords and kill the green man. In a ritual from Picardy, a member of the Compagnons du Loup Vert (dressed in a green wolf skin and foliage)
enters the village church carrying a candle and garlands of flowers. He
waits until the Gloria is sung, then he walks to the alter and stands through
the mass. At its end, the entire congregation rushes up to strip the green
wolf of his leaves.

The Green Man's female
counterpart is the Green Woman, or the Sheela-Na-Gig . . .

. . . usually depicted in stone carvings as a primitive
female form giving birth to a spray of vegetation. Green Women are
far less common than Green Men, being rather harder to adapt to Christian
iconography or Victorian decoration -- and yet quite a few them appear in Romaneque churches built before the 16th century. Although Ireland has the greatest number of Sheela-Na-Gigs, they can be found throughout the British Isles, as well as in France, Spain, Switzerland, Belgium, and the Czech Republic.

Like the sacred
"yoni" carvings of India, it was once customary to lick one's
finger and touch the Sheela-Na-Gig's vulva for good fortune.

A number of contemporary artists have found inspiration in the
ancient lore of the wood, including Brian Froud in Devon (creator of the Green Man painting and Green Woman drawing in this post) and Fidelma Massey
in Ireland (creator of mythic sculpture like the magical tree-woman above,
"A Shrine to the Mother of All Birds"). There have also been two
international art series recently that have drawn their inspiration from
the folklore of the wild: Eyes as Big as Plates (originating in Norway) and Wilder Mann (originating in France).

The two photographs directly above, and the one directly below, come from Eyes as Big as Plates, an ongoing project dreamed up by artists Riitta Ikonen (originally from Finland) and Karoline Hjorth (from Norway). "Inspired by the romantics’ belief that folklore is the clearest
reflection of the soul of a people," says Ikonen, "Eyes as Big as Plates started out as
a play on characters and protagonists from Norwegian folklore. During a
one month residency at the Kinokino Centre for Art and Film in south-west Norway, Karoline and I collaborated with sailors, farmers, professors, artisans, psychologists, teachers, parachuters and senior citizens. The series then moved on to exploring the mental landscape of the
neighborly and pragmatic Finns." The third chapter of the project has taken Ikonen and Hjorth to New York City this spring.

“This blending of figure and ground," explains the artists, "recalls the way in which folk
narratives animate the natural world through a personification of
nature. The slippage of elderly figures into the landscapes suggests a
return to the earth, a celebration of lives lived, reinforcing the link
between humanity and the natural world.”

The images below come from Wilder Mann, a photography series by Charles Fréger (based in Rouen, France), who spent two years traveling around Europe documenting the folk pageants and festivals of what he calls "tribal Europe." The resulting photographic exhibition just moved from New York to Switzerland, and the images have been collected into a stunningly beautiful art book. (You can see more of Fréger's photographs here.)

As Rachel Hartigan Shea explains in an article about the series, "Traditionally the festivals are a rite of passage for young men. Dressing in
the garb of a bear or wild man is a way of 'showing your power,' says
Fréger. Heavy bells hang from many costumes to signal virility. The question is whether Europeans — civilized Europeans — believe that
these rituals must be observed in order for the land, the livestock,
and the people to be fertile. Do they really believe that costumes and
rituals have the power to banish evil and end winter? 'They all know
they shouldn’t believe it,' says Gerald Creed, who has studied mask
traditions in Bulgaria. Modern life tells them not to. But they remain
open to the possibility that the old ways run deep.'"

Likewise, the mythic scholar Daniel C. Noel is struck by the masculine power of Green Man lore: "Whether the Green
Man, is some sort of Jungian archetype 'returning' from a primeval past, a
Celtic survival in the psyche, seems not
as important to me as the metaphor he constitutes for men, and for the
gender-embattled culture, in the present and future. Whatever the
metaphysics of this fascinating figure, it is enough that he is a green
ideal and a good idea arriving from wherever to inspire us. We have
needed a
Father Nature for a long time, and never more urgently than now, when
all
over the planet, armored men, in or out of uniform, terrorize each
other,
women and children, and what remains of the wildwood."

Let's give Henry David Thoreauthe last word today on why the wild and the folklore of the wild still matter: "Shall I not have intelligence with the earth?" he asks (in Walden). "Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself?"

The art above: A Green Man painting byBrian Froud; a Green Man carving in a church near Birmingham; Jack-in-the-Greens in Oxford and the City of London (photographs from the "In the Company of the Green Man" blog); a Green Woman drawing byBrian Froud; a Sheela-na-gig carving at a church in County Clare, Ireland; "A Shrine for the Mother of the Birds" by Fidelma Massey; three photographs fromRiitta IkonenandKaroline Hjorth's "Eyes as Big as Plates" collaborative art project, the first from Norway, the second two from Finland; and four photographs fromCharles Fréger's "Wilder Mann" series: a sauvage in Switerland, three kurkeri in Bulgaria, a careto in Portugal, and a devil in St. Nicholas' retinue in the Czech Republic. All art works are copyright by the artists.

Recommended reading... Nonfiction: "Gossip from the Forest" by Sara Maitland (published as "From the Forest" in the US), "Forests" by Robert Pogue Harrison, "Green Man" by William Anderson & Clive Hicks, Sheela-Na-Gigs" by Barbara Freitag, and "Meetings With Remarkable Trees" by Thomas Pakenham. Fiction: The Mythago Wood Series by Robert Holstock; "Forests of the Heart," "The Wild Wood," and "Jack in the Mist" by Charles de Lint; "In the Forests of Serre," "Winter Rose," and "Solstice Wood" by Patricia McKillp; and "The Green Man: Tales from the Mythic Forest," a Datlow-Windling anthology. For children: "Grumbles from the Forest" by Jane Yolen & Rebecca Kai Dotlich and "Into the Forest" by Anthony Browne. Poetry: "The Forest" by Susan Stewart. Art: "Wood" by Andy Goldsworthy and "Wilder Mann" by Charles Fregér.

Monday, May 20, 2013

I'm running late this morning as I'm a bit under the weather today, but here are the Monday Tunes at last: some music from the woods and wilds in order to keep to our woodlands theme. These songs come from Soundcloud rather than YouTube because I couldn't find video performances of the pieces I particularly wanted to play this morning....

First up, "Home" by the Michigan alt-folk trio Breathe Owl Breathe, gently calling us out of the house and out of doors:

Next, "On Trees and Birds and Fire," a magical little tune from I Am the Oak, the band of the Dutch singer/songwriter Thijs Kuijken, based in Utrecht:

Third is "Furr," a charming story of woods, wolves, and transformation from the Oregon alt-folk band Blitzen Trapper:

Next, "The Wild Hunt," a rather upbeat song about death and the Wild Hunt legends of northern Europe: myth meets Bob Dylan. It comes The Tallest Man On Earth, which is the stage name of the Swedish singer/songwriter Kristian Matsson:

And last, here's the English alt-folk band Matthew & the Atlas, calling us back from the wilds again with their utterly gorgeous song "Come Out of the Woods":

The drawings above are "Tree Nymph" and "Beauty as the Beast" by the always-amazing Virginia Lee, no stranger to the wilds herself.

Saturday, May 18, 2013

I've been asked to give my thoughts on woods and wilderness from a furry, four-footed perspective. It's simple. We should spend more time there.

My People are intelligent People, and so I don't understand how they have gotten this matter precisely backwards. We spend some time each day outdoors, but many more hours in the House or Studio. Surely it is obvious that this is the reverse of what life ought to be?

My People like poetry, and so I present this poem by Mary Oliver to make my case. This poet belongs to a dog named Percy. Percy is very wise.

Percy and Books

Percy does not like it when I read a book.
He puts his face over the top of it, and moans.
He rolls his eyes, sometimes he sneezes.
The sun is up, he says, and the wind is down.
The tide is out, and the neighbor's dogs are playing.
But Percy, I say, Ideas! The elegance of language!
The insights, the funniness, the beautiful stories
that rise and fall and turn into strength, or courage.
Books? says Percy. I ate one once, and it was not enough. Let's go.

Friday, May 17, 2013

From Gossip from the Forest: The Tangled Roots of Our Forests and Fairy Tales by Sara Maitland (which I'm reading now and highly recommend):

"Forests to the [early] Northern European peoples were dangerous and generous, domestic and wild, beautiful and terrible. And the forests were the terrain out of which fairy stories, one of our earliest and most vital cultural forms, evolved. The mysterious secrets and silences, gifts and perils of the forest are both the background to and source of these tales....

"Forests are places where a person can get lost and also hide -- and losing and hiding, of things and people, are central to European fairy stories in ways that are not true of similar stories in different geographies. Landscape informs the collective imagination as much as or more than it forms the individual psyche and its imagination, but this dimension is not something to which we always pay enough attention.

"I believe that the great stretches of forests in northern Europe, with their constant seasonal changes, their restricted views, their astonish biological diversity, their secret gifts and perils and the knowledge that you have to go through them to get anywhere else, created the themes and ethics of the fairy tales we know best. There are secrets, hidden identities, cunning disguises; there are rhythms of change like the changes of the seasons; there are characters, both human and animal, whose assistance can be earned or spurned; and there is -- over and over again -- the journey or quest, which leads first to knowledge and then to happiness. The forest is the place of trial in fairy stories, both dangerous and exciting. Coming to terms with the forest, surviving its terrors, utilising its gifts and gaining its help is the way to 'happy ever after.'

"Now fairy stories are at risk too, like the forests. Padraic Column has suggested that artificial lighting dealt them a mortal wound: when people could read and be productive after dark, something fundamental changed, and there was no longer need or space for the ancient oral tradition. The stories were often confined to books, which makes the text static, and they were handed over to children.

"The whole tradition of [oral] story telling is endangered by modern technology. Although telling stories is a very fundamental human attribute, to the extent that psychiatry now often treats 'narrative loss' -- the inability to construct a story of one's own life -- as a loss of identity or 'personhood,' it is not natural but an art form -- you have to learn to tell stories. The well-meaning mother is constantly frustrated by the inability of her child to answer questions like 'What did you do today?' (to which the answer is usually a muttered 'nothing' -- but the 'nothing' is cover for 'I don't know how to tell a good story about it, how to impose a story shape on the events'). To tell stories, you have to hear stories and you have to have an audience to hear the stories you tell. Oral story telling is economically unproductive -- there is no marketable product; it is out with the laws of patents and copyright; it cannot easily be commodified; it is a skill without monetary value. And above all, it is an activity requiring leisure -- the oral tradition stands squarely against a modern work ethic....Traditional fairy stories, like all oral traditions, need the sort of time that isn't money.

"The deep connect between the forests and the core stories has been lost; fairy stories and forests have been moved into different catagories and, isolated, both are at risk of disappearing, misunderstood and culturally undervalued, 'useless' in the sense of 'financially unprofitable.' "

“When we walk, holding stories in us, do they touch the ground
through our footprints? What is this power of metaphor, by which we
liken a thing we see to a thing we imagine or have seen before — the
granite crag to an old crystalline heart — changing its form, allowing
animation to suffuse the world via inference? Metaphor, perhaps, is the
tame, the civilised, version of shamanic shapeshifting, word-magic, the
recognition of stories as toothed messengers from the wilds. What if we
turned the old nursery rhymes and fairytales we all know into feral
creatures once again, set them loose in new lands to root through the
acorn fall of oak trees? What else is there to do, if we want to keep
any of the wildness of the world, and of ourselves?”

"What is wild cannot be bought or sold, borrowed or copied. It is. Unmistakeable, unforgettable, unshamable, elemental as earth and ice, water, fire and air, a quitessence, pure spirit, resolving into no contituents. Don't waste your wildness: it is precious and necessary.”

Fairy tale illustrations above: "The Princess in the Forest" by John Bauer (Norway), "He Too Saw the Image in the Water" by Kay Nielsen (Denmark), "Lost in the Woods" by Charles Robinson (England),"Thumbelina" by Adrienne Segur (France), "The Frog Prince" by Warwick Goble (England), and "Catskin" by Arthur Rackham (England).

Thursday, May 16, 2013

“The image of a wood has appeared often enough in English verse. It has indeed appeared so often that it has gathered a good deal of verse into itself; so that it has become a great forest where, with long leagues of changing green between them, strange episodes of poetry have taken place. Thus in one part there are lovers of a midsummer night, or by day a duke and his followers, and in another men behind branches so that the wood seems moving, and in another a girl separated from her two lordly young brothers, and in another a poet listening to a nightingale but rather dreaming richly of the grand art than there exploring it, and there are other inhabitants, belonging even more closely to the wood, dryads, fairies, an enchanter's rout. The forest itself has different names in different tongues -- Westermain, Arden, Birnam, Broceliande; and in places there are separate trees named, such as that on the outskirts against which a young Northern poet saw a spectral wanderer leaning, or, in the unexplored centre of which only rumours reach even poetry, Igdrasil of one myth, or the Trees of Knowledge and Life of another. So that indeed the whole earth seems to become this one enormous forest, and our longest and most stable civilizations are only clearings in the midst of it.” ― Charles Williams (The Figure of Beatrice)

"I’ve often thought of the forest as a living cathedral, but this might diminish what it truly is. If I have understood Koyukon teachings, the forest is not merely an expression or representation of sacredness, nor a place to invoke the sacred; the forest is sacredness itself. Nature is not merely created by God; nature is God. Whoever moves within the forest can partake directly of sacredness, experience sacredness with his entire body, breathe sacredness and contain it within himself, drink the sacred water as a living communion, bury his feet in sacredness, touch the living branch and feel the sacredness, open his eyes and witness the burning beauty of sacredness.” - Richard Nelson (The Island Within)

“He stood staring into the wood for a minute, then said: 'What is it about the English countryside -- why is the beauty so much more than visual? Why does it touch one so?'

"He sounded faintly sad. Perhaps he finds beauty saddening -- I do myself sometimes. Once when I was quite little I asked father why this was and he explained that it was due to our knowledge of beauty's evanescence, which reminds us that we ourselves shall die. Then he said I was probably too young to understand him; but I understood perfectly.” - Dodie Smith (I Capture the Castle)

“All forests have their own personality. I don't just mean the obvious differences, like how an English woodland is different from a Central American rain forest, or comparing tracts of West Coast redwoods to the saguaro forests of the American Southwest...they each have their own gossip, their own sound, their own rustling whispers and smells. A voice speaks up when you enter their acres that can't be mistaken for one you'd hear anyplace else, a voice true to those particular tress, individual rather than of their species.” ― Charles de Lint (The Onion Girl)

How I Go to the Woods

Ordinarily I go to the woods alone, with not a single friend,for they are all smilers and talkersand therefore unsuitable.I don’t really want to be witnessed talking to the catbirdsor hugging the old black oak tree.I have my ways of praying,as you no doubt have yours.Besides, when I am aloneI can become invisible.I can sit on the top of a duneas motionless as an uprise of weeds,until the foxes run by unconcerned.I can hear the almost unhearable sound of the roses singing.If you have ever gone to the woods with me,I must love you very much.

Robert Pogue Harrison (author of the Forests: The Shadow of Civilization) recommends the work of four other fine poets of the forest: Andrea Zanzotto, Susan Stewart, A.R. Ammons, and W.S. Merwin. But Harrison's fear is that "the rapidity with which our society is losing daily contact with the natural world will make it more and more unlikely that we will have poets of the forest like Zanzotto or Merwin, or Stewart, who grew up on a farm in the midst of Pennsylvania's forests. The more our worlds are detached and abstracted from nature in this daily way, the more I fear that poets will invoke the forests in only the most superficial of ways, without the kind of full-bodied authority that a lived relationship to the forest creates."

The late naturalist John Hay would have agreed that the forest poet must be one who knows the land, which takes both proximity and time. "There are occasions," he wrote (in The Immortal Wilderness), "when you can hear the mysterious language of the Earth: in water, or coming through the trees, emanating from the mosses, seeping through the under currents of the soil, but you have to be willing to wait and receive.”

As Tilly and I scramble over rock and root, as we do most mornings, rain or shine, I pray that our own small patch of woods remains safe, remains wild, remains here for future generations to come "home" to. I pray for patience to wait, and ears to listen, and a heart wide open, ready to receive. I want to be wild myself, like the woodland creatures in these paintings, in my quiet scribbler's way. But what is the wild? asks Louise Erdrich (in The Blue Jay's Dance). A place? A state of mind? The conjunction of these things? "What is wilderness?" she muses. "What are dreams but an internal wilderness and what is desire but a wildness of the soul?”

Bernard Malamud's answer is simple and speaks to all of us, rural and urban, young and old. “The wild," he says, "begins where you least expect it, one step off your normal course."

Wednesday, May 15, 2013

In the lovely video above, children's book author Cornelia Funke speaks about the need for wilderness in children's lives. "Kids are so very good at still being shape-shifters," she says, "and shifting into feathers and fur. They still understand that we are connected to everything in this world, and that we are part of an incredibly intricate woven web of life and creatures."

Raised and educated in Germany, Funke was originally a book illustrator before turning her hand to writing fiction herself -- creating magical novels such as the The Thief Lord, Dragon Rider, and The Inkheart Trilogy that have become international bestsellers. She now lives in Los Angeles.

"In a way that I haven’t yet figured out how to fully articulate, I believe that children who get to see bald eagles, coyotes, deer, moose, grouse, and other similar sights each morning will have a certain kind of matrix or fabric or foundation of childhood, the nature and quality of which will be increasing rare and valuable as time goes on, and which will be cherished into adulthood, as well as becoming -- and this is a leap of faith by me -- a source of strength and knowledge to them somehow. That the daily witnessing of the natural wonders is a kind of education of logic and assurance that cannot be duplicated by any other means, or in other place: unique and significant, and, by God, still somehow relevant, even now, in the twenty-first century. For as long as possible, I want my girls to keep believing that beauty, though not quite commonplace and never to pass unobserved or unappreciated, is nonetheless easily witnessed on any day, in any given moment, around any forthcoming bend." - Rick Bass ("The Return")

“If I had influence with the good fairy who is supposed to preside over the christening of all children I should ask that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life, as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantments of later years, the sterile preoccupation with things artificial, the alienation from the sources of our strength.” - Rachel Carson (A Sense of Wonder)

“I wonder how it is we have come to this place in our society where art and nature are spoke in terms of what is optional, the pastime and concern of the elite?” - Terry Tempest Williams (Leap)

This post is for Charlotte Hills and all of the other teachers out there, with gratitude for the vital work you do. The pictures above: one of the deer children from my old Desert Spritis series, and two bunny girls from a Devon sketchbook.

Tuesday, May 14, 2013

Make a place to sit down. Sit down. Be quiet. You must depend upon affection, reading, knowledge, skill -- more of each than you have -- inspiration, work, growing older, patience, for patience joins time to eternity…

Breathe with unconditional breath the unconditioned air. Shun electric wire. Communicate slowly. Live a three-dimensional life; stay away from screens. Stay away from anything that obscures the place it is in. There are no unsacred places; there are only sacred places and desecrated places.

Accept what comes from silence. Make the best you can of it. Of the little words that come out of the silence, like prayers prayed back to the one who prays, make a poem that does not disturb the silence from which it came.

"The world is holy. We are holy. All life is holy. Daily prayers are delivered on the lips of breaking waves, the whisperings of grasses, the shimmering of leaves." - Terry Tempest Williams (Leap)

“I breathe in the soft, saturated exhalations of cedar trees and salmonberry bushes, fireweed and wood fern, marsh hawks and meadow voles, marten and harbor seal and blacktail deer. I breathe in the same particles of air that made songs in the throats of hermit thrushes and gave voices to humpback whales, the same particles of air that lifted the wings of bald eagles and buzzed in the flight of hummingbirds, the same particles of air that rushed over the sea in storms, whirled in high mountain snows, whistled across the poles, and whispered through lush equatorial gardens…air that has passed continually through life on earth. I breathe it in, pass it on, share it in equal measure with billions of other living things, endlessly, infinitely.” - Richard Nelson (The Island Within)

“Breathing involves a continual oscillation between exhaling and inhaling, offering ourselves to the world at one moment and drawing the world into ourselves at the next.” - David Abram (Becoming Animal)

Making art is like breathing. Creation is the exhalation, putting ideas, emotions, patterns, rhythms, and revelations of beauty out into the world through the materials of our chosen art forms. But first comes the inhalation. We can't produce and produce without stopping to breathe. We must take the world in: land and wind, books and song, love and passion, silence and conversation; all those things that inspire us, fill us, delight us, enrage us, alchemize into art inside of us; all those things that form and change and batter our lives and give us something to say; all those things that, mixed together in unique proportions, give us tales that are truly our own.

Below: "A Brown Pony Rubbing His Ass Against An Ancient Stone, A White Pony Scratching Her Neck Against Another." About this one, he says: "This, in visual metaphor, pretty much expresses my spiritual belief of finding the balance between the sacred and the profane."

Monday, May 13, 2013

Today's first tune, on this May morning so early, is a Flemish song called "The Maying Song" -- performed by the English folk musician Bella Hardy, with Ian Stephenson and Chris Sherburn. (Ignore the obnoxious advertisement at the video's start -- it goes away soon!)

Hardy, who is from the Peak District in Derbyshire, has five fine albums to date. This is a performance from 2008, because there aren't many good Hardy videos available, alas. If you'd like to hear a bit more of her music, try "The Driving of the Deer," from last year's CD, The Dark Peak and the White. And I particularly recommend her latest album, Battleplan, in which "traditional ballads are re-imagined from a female perspective, and personal experiences are reflected against fairy tales and folklore."

Next: another "roving out" song, but a bawdier version this time, sung by Kathryn Roberts. You may remember Roberts from her younger days, when she recorded a lovely debut CD with Kate Rusby. Now she's teamed up with her husband Sean Lakeman (Seth's brother), performing both original and traditional material. They've released three albums (1, 2, and Hidden People), and all of them are good.

Below: Kathryn Roberts again, solo this time, performing her "Ballad of Andy Jacobs" -- a sad and beautiful song about the miners' strikes under Thatcher, inspired by her childhood in a Yorkshire mining town. (She talks about this briefly at the end of the video.) This one is timely too, with Britain still reeling from Thatcher's divisive funeral.

Below, Kris Drever, with another poignant song about another tragic time in the UK's history: "The Poorest Company," about the Highland clearances. Drever, who is from the Orkney Isles of Scotland, has played with Kate Rusby, Eddi Reader, Julie Fowlis, and is one of the founding members of Lau. Here, he's performing at Celtic Connections in Glasgow, with Roddy Woomble, John McCusker, and Heidi Talbot. Although I like his CDs with Lau the best (they're just astonishingly good), his solo albums Black Water and Mark the Hard Earth are also very fine, as is Before the Ruin with Woomble and McCusker.

I was going to stop there, but let's end on a more hopeful note...

Below: "Start it all Over Again," an old Battlefield Band song exquisitely performed by Irish singer Heidi Talbot -- backed up by her husband, Scottish fiddler John McCusker, and Boo Hewerdine. Talbot, formerly of Cherish the Ladies, has released five solo albums, of which I especially like the latest, Angel Without Wings.

If you stutter or stumble, if dreams start to crumbleI'll pick up the pieces of pain. I will cradle you, cry with you, pray that tonight we'll just start it all over again...

Saturday, May 11, 2013

I am the luckiest dog in the world, with woods and hills and fields to roam in, rivers to jump in, Evil Cats to guard my territory from, and plenty of Dastardly Squirrels to chase. Every day brings new surprises. Sometimes a deer bounds through the trees, or I flush a pheasant out of the grass. Sometimes I discover fresh fox poo (my favorite!), or wildflowers growing in a perfect circle where fairy feet have danced (we dogs can see the fairies, of course).

This week I spied a strange dark shape behind the old oak at the bottom of the hill. I thought it might be hedge witch or a troll (I found a troll quite close by last year) ...

...but it was another wild pony, down from the moor. And she wasn't alone.

Behind her was a foal, still wobbly on its legs. I kept my distance, as I've been trained, but I wagged my tale, and the foal came walking over...while Mama Pony did the funniest thing.

She knealt down on the grass, rolled over and over, and kicked her legs. What fun!

First she rolled left, and then she rolled right...

...and then she rolled some more.

The foal battted her big eyes at me while the Mama jumped up and shook her tail...

...then Baby wobbled over to Mama, had a little cuddle...

and they trotted away.

At home, I demonstrated for my People.

"First she kicked her legs like this," I said,

"and then like this and this."

I often do interpretive dance, and now I've learned some excellent new moves.

My People liked my Pony Dance much better than the last one, my Rolling in Fox Poo Dance. This time I got a nice new bone. Last time it was a bath and a telling off....

Friday, May 10, 2013

I'm delighted to pass on the following Public Service Announcement from my husband Howard and his elusive friend Rex...

The Barleycorn Boys Are Back in Town!

Guess who just got back today? Howard and Rex, those wild eyed boys who’ve been away.

We’ve been off the grid for a bit, wrestling with our creative muses. (Literally, in Rex’s case; he’s muddy and bruised!) Now spring has sprung, and we’re back in the virtual world, and we have a trinity of delights to share:

1. We’re now posting our complete graphic novel, John Barleycorn Must Die, online at a page a day on our new John Barleycorn blog. If you haven’t read it yet, now’s your chance.

3. Rex now has a Facebook page (god help us!), called Rex Van Ryn Presents. He’ll be discussing all things comics related (artists who started in comics, celebrities who are comic enthusiasts, etc.), and providing links to what is happening in the comics world at the moment, particularly independent comics. It’s all just getting started, so please come join in the conversation (and keep an eye on Rex!)

"I want to extoll not the sweetness or placidity of the dog, but the
wilderness out of which he cannot entirely step, and from which we
benefit. For wilderness is our first home too, and in our wild ride into
modernity with all its concerns and problems we need also all the good
attachments to that origin that we can keep or restore. Dog is one of
the messengers of that rich and still magical first world. The dog would
remind us of the pleasures of the body with its graceful physicality,
and the acuity and rapture of the senses, and the beauty of forest and
ocean and rain and our own breath. There is not a dog that romps or runs
but we learn from him....

"Because of the dog's joyfulness, our own is increased. It is no small
gift. It is not the least reason we should honor as well as love the dog
of our own life, and the dog down the street, and all the dogs not yet
born. What would life be like without music or rivers or the green and
tender grass? What would this world be like without dogs?"

“In a society
so estranged from animals as ours, we often fail to credit them with
any form of language. If we do, it comes under the heading of
communication rather than speech. And yet, the great silence we have
imposed on the rest of life contains innumerable forms of expression.
Where does our own language come from but this unfathomed store that
characterizes innumerable species?

"We
are now more than halfway removed from what the unwritten word meant
to our ancestors, who believed in the original, primal word behind
all manifestations of the spirit. You sang because you were answered.
The answers come from life around you. Prayers, chants, and songs
were also responses to the elements, to the wind, the sun and stars,
the Great Mystery behind them. Life on earth springs from a
collateral magic that we rarely consult. We avoid the unknown as if
we were afraid that contact would lower our sense of self-esteem.”

"Love is a powerful tool, and maybe, just maybe, before the last
little town is corrupted and the last of the unroaded and undeveloped
wildness is given over to dreams of profit, maybe it will be love,
finally, love for the land for its own sake and for what it holds of
beauty and joy and spiritual redemption that will make wilderness not a
battlefield but a revelation."

Thursday, May 09, 2013

" 'All beginnings wear their endings like dark shadows," says astronomer-physicist Chet Raymo. And maybe they do. If endings are foreshadowed by their beginnings, or are in some way the same thing, it is important that we circle around and come back to look at our human myths and stories. Unlike the cyclical nature of time for the Maya, the Western tradition of beliefs within a straight line of history leads to an apocalyptic end. And stories of the end, like those of the beginning, tell something about the people who created them....

"Without deep reflection, we have taken on the story of endings, assumed the story of extinction, and have believed that it is the certain outcome of our presence here. From this position, fear, bereavement, and denial keeps us in the state of estrangement from our natural connection with land.

"We need new stories, new terms and conditions that are relevant to the love of land, a new narrative that would imagine another way, to learn the infinite mystery and movement at work in the world. It would mean we, like the corn people of the Maya, give praise and nurture creation.

"Indian people must not be the only ones who remember the agreement with
the land, the sacred pact to honor and care for the life that, in
turn, provides for us. We need to reach a hand back through time and a
hand forward , stand at the zero point of creation to be certain we do
not create the absence of life, of any species, no matter how
inconsequential they might appear to be. "

"It is in our nature to need stories. They are our earliest sciences, a
kind of people-physics. Their logic is how we naturally think. They
configure our biology, and how we feel, in ways long essential for our
survival.

"Like our language instinct, a story drive -- an inborn hunger for story
hearing and story making -- emerges untutored universally in healthy
children. Every culture bathes their children in stories to explain how
the world works and to engage and educate their emotions. Perhaps story
patterns could be considered another higher layer of language. A sort of
meta-grammar shaped by and shaping conventions of character types,
plots, and social-rule dilemmas prevalent in our culture."

"The sense of being immersed in a sentient world is preserved in
the oral stories and songs of indigenous peoples -- in the belief that
sensible phenomena are all alive and aware, in the assumption that all
things have the capacity of speech. Language, for oral peoples, is not a
human invention but a gift of the land itself."

The lands around my dwellingAre more beautiful
From the day
When it is given me to see
Faces I have never seen before.
All is more beautiful.
All is more beautiful.
And life is thankfulness.
These guests of mine
Make my house grand.

- Eskimo song

Deep peace of the running wave to you.
Deep peace of the flowing air to you.
Deep peace of the quiet earth to you.
Deep peace of the shining stars to you.
Deep peace of the infinite peace to you.

- Gaelic blessing

The images in this post are by the American photographer Stu Jenks, who was visiting us here just recently, taking many beautiful Dartmoor photographs. (I know Stu from my Arizona days, when we had studios in the same building in downtown Tucson.) To see more of his work, visit his website & blog, where he'll be adding other images from his travels in England and France in the days to come.

Wednesday, May 08, 2013

This exhibition at Green Hill Arts in Moretonhampstead will feature work by Chagford artists Alan Lee, Virginia Lee, Brian & Wendy Froud, David Wyatt, Rima Staines, and yours truly, along with Hazel Brown, Paul Kidby, and Neil Wilkinson Cave. It's running most of the summer, so if you're local or making a trip down to Devon, keep it in mind...

There will also be a program of events (talks, readings, workshops, etc.). For more information, go to Green Hill Arts.

Exhibition poster art: The painting of faeries dancing widdershins is by Alan Lee, the design is by David Wyatt.

Myth & Moor

by Terri Windling

I'm a writer, artist, and book editor interested in myth, folklore, fairy tales, and the ways they are used in contemporary arts. I workin the New York publishing industry but I live in alittle village at the edgeof Dartmoor in Devon, England, with my husband, dramatist & puppeteer Howard Gayton, our daughter, Victoria Windling-Gayton, and a joyful hound named Tilly (a Springer Spaniel/Labrador cross).

If you'd like to know more, my publishing bio is here, and my website is here.

“There are some people who live in a dream world,” said Douglas Everett, “and some who face reality; and then there are those who turn one into the other.”

I want to be the latter.

About this blog:

Myth & Moor is a daily journal for musings about art, myth, books, village life, and the world-wide community of folks who create and love Mythic Arts.

The 37th International Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts: I'm delighted to be Guest of Honor in 2016 along with writer Holly Black and fairy tale scholar Cristina Bacchilega. ICFA is held annually in Orlando, Florida in March. Further information on the 37th conference will be posted soon.

Other events in 2015/2016 are still being confirmed, so please check back.

Take a stroll through our village (and its environs) by visiting my neighbors' blogs & sites:

"As a poet I hold the most archaic values on earth...the fertility of the soil, the magic of animals, the power-vision in solitude, the terrifying initiation and rebirth, the love and ecstasy of the dance, the common work of the tribe. I try to hold both history and the wilderness in mind, that my poems may approach the true measure of things and stand against the unbalance and ignorance of our times." - Gary Snyder

"People talk about medium. What is your medium? My medium as a writer has been dirt, clay, sand - what I could touch, hold, stand on, and stand for - Earth. My medium has been Earth. Earth in correspondence with my mind.” - Terry Tempest Williams

"This earth that we live on is full of stories in the same way that, for a fish, the ocean is full of ocean. Some people say when we are born we’re born into stories. I say we’re also born from stories." - Ben Okri

"Everything is held together with stories. That is all that is holding us together, stories and compassion." - Barry Lopez

Bookshelf

The Wood Wife:A mythic novel set in the Sonoran desert of Arizona. This link goes to the US edition; a UK edition is available here; and the new French edition is here. (For those who might be interested, I did a Q-&-A session on the book over on the Good Reads site.) Winner of the Mythopoeic Award.

Welcome to Bordertown:The latest volume in a classic Urban Fantasy series for YA readers. (An Audie Award nominee, for the audio book edition.) For information on the previous books, visit the Bordertown website.)

All told, I've published over forty books for children, teenagers and adults. More information on my writing, editing, and art can be found on my website.

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Please note that these books are linked to Amazon because it's the only book linking system that Typepad (this blogging service) has,but I urge you to please support your local bookstore if you plan to purchase any of the books mentioned on this blog.

Links to:

The Endicott StudioThe nonprofit organization for Mythic Arts that I ran for 22 years (starting in 1986), co-directed with author & folklorist Midori Snyder. The organization is currently on hiatus (while we catch our breaths and make a living), but a great deal of material from our Journal of Mythic Arts archive remains online.

Interstitial ArtsEllen Kushner, Delia Sherman, & other good folk look at writing and art in the interstices between genres. I was one of the founding board members, and remain an enthusiastic supporter.

Brain PickingsI have no connection whatsoever with this inspiring blog by Maria Popova. I list it here because it's my favorite site on the Web, and deserves to be widely known.